The Bling Ring (21 page)

A 2011 study by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that reality television may be having an unhealthy effect on the self-image of girls—50 percent of whom said they believed reality TV was “real.” The Girl Scout study found that 68 percent of regular reality TV viewers believe that “it's in girls' nature to be catty and competitive with one another,” while only (only?) 50 percent of nonviewers do. Seventy-eight percent said that “gossiping is a normal part of a relationship between girls,” and 63 percent said, “it's hard for me to trust other girls,” compared with half of nonviewers. A higher percentage of reality TV viewers also agreed that “Being mean earns you more respect than being nice” and “You have to be mean to others to get what you want.”

In a 2010 lecture titled “Project Brainwash: Why Reality TV Is Bad for Women,” media critic Jennifer Pozner railed against how reality TV “crushes” women for our amusement, calling it a “pop cultural backlash against women's rights and social progress.” What's disturbing is why the women who appear on these shows submit themselves to the negative stereotypes they're asked to fulfill—do they want to be famous that bad? Is fame more important than self-respect? Is it really worth the money?

That was always Kate Gosselin's argument: that she needed to put her kids on
Jon and Kate Plus 8
(2007–2011) in order to keep food on the table (meanwhile the show made her famous and rich). Gosselin was criticized for airing her toddlers' private moments on camera; but this was really nothing compared with the mother on an episode of
Toddlers & Tiaras
(2009–), who dressed up her four-year-old like Julia Roberts as the prostitute in
Pretty Woman
. Or June Shannon, the mom on
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo
(2012–), who plies her six-year-old daughter Alana, a.k.a. “Honey Boo Boo Child”—an inverse Shirley Temple for our age, a little girl with the moves of a stripper and the catch phrase “A dolla make me holla”—with a caffeine cocktail of Red Bull and Mountain Dew (she calls it “go-go juice”) to get her energy up to perform. “There are far worse things,” Shannon said in an interview. “I could be giving her alcohol.”

Pretty Wild
fulfilled both trends: that of women and children being exploited in the name of “reality.” “I am the mother of three wild and crazy teenage girls,” Andrea says in the pilot of the show, announcing to the world that her daughters (one of whom, again, was not actually her daughter) are out of control. Throughout the series (which would last one season), she could be seen giving Tess and Alexis Adderall. “Every morning I give the girls Adderall,” Andrea cheerfully informs the camera. “Time for your Adderall!” she calls. (Alexis said she was taking the prescription drug for ADD, but it was never clear why Tess was taking it.)

“Alexis and Tess, it is time for school!” Andrea shouts in
Pretty Wild
. But both Tess and Alexis were done with high school well before the show was filmed (Alexis graduated from her homeschooling program when she was 16). You can only wonder if it was considered more titillating for the audience to think of Tess and Alexis as barely legal, high-school–age girls. In nearly every episode, an excuse was found to show them in bikinis, even topless (with their breasts fuzzed out for broadcast), disrobing. In one episode they could be seen wearing bikinis and pole dancing in the living room. In another pole-dancing scene, Andrea joins in, awkwardly spinning around the metal bar. (The pole was installed in their house for the series.)

In an episode entitled “Breast Wishes,” Andrea takes Gabby bra shopping at a lingerie store, encouraging the 16-year-old to try on a sexy black lace brassiere. “I'm gonna try it on too because I think maybe we should have matching bras,” Andrea tells Gabby. “No!” Gabby shouts. But Andrea does so anyway, appearing alongside her daughter and wearing the same bra as they look in the store mirror together, Gabby scowling.

The girls of
Pretty Wild
were stereotyped; but so was Andrea herself, cast in the role of the jealous mom who's competitive with her beautiful young daughters. She played the anxious MILF, or, pardon the expression, “Mother I'd Like to Fuck”—a designation which didn't exist until being “hot” seemed to become more important, in the gaze of pop culture, than being a mother.

20

The impossible new standards of youthful beauty do seem to have made it harder for some mothers to watch their daughters develop into young women and therefore gracefully accept that this means that they, too, are aging. It's a malaise that seems to be felt particularly hard by the Baby Boomer generation. As Baby Boomers started getting older, they resisted the inevitable—they wanted to look younger. And an America obsessed with the rich and famous wanted to look like the rich and famous could afford to look—which always meant looking younger.

The past decade has seen a huge boom in the anti-aging and plastic surgery industries. Ten years ago we had Oil of Olay; now there is micro-dermabrasion, Retin-A, antioxidants, and peels. “Fillers” like Restylane are becoming so mainstream, women in Dallas are getting them done in the mall. Americans spent $10.1 billion on plastic surgery in 2011, undergoing nearly 14 million cosmetic procedures, an 87 percent increase since 2000. Between 2000 and 2011, Botox treatments were up 621 percent. More than 230,000 cosmetic plastic surgery procedures were performed on people ages 13 to 19 in 2011. And American girls had 8,892 breast implants.

It's hard not to see Americans' preoccupation with their appearance as anything but another symptom of a culture of narcissism. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory includes the statements, “I like to look at myself in the mirror” and “I like to show off my body.” The preoccupation with good looks and fame merged in the MTV reality show
I Want a Famous Face
(2004–), which follows the lives of 12 young people who receive extensive plastic surgery so they can look like their favorite celebrities—among them, Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin, and Victoria Beckham.

As never before, Americans seem concerned with looking, as Paris Hilton called it, “hot.” Interestingly, the precursor to Facebook was Facemash, a website launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, on which students could vote on the hotness of their fellow students. Now Facebook has become the central stage on which nearly a billion people worldwide post pictures and other content about themselves, promoting their greatness and hotness. Hot Or Not, a website launched in 2000 with basically the same idea (and no connection to Zuckerberg), has attracted hundreds of millions of users internationally who have voted over eight billion times on each other's hot-or-notness.

After she finished filming that scene with Gabby and her ex-husband, Andrea came into the kitchen fiddling with her mic box. “Dude,” she told me (like Audrina Patridge's mom, she often talked in that rough Bro-Speak most commonly associated with teenagers), “I can never figure out how to put on this thing. Tessie and Alexis and I were at a runway show—and I was looking so hot, this young guy were checking me out—and the mic box slid down my hose. It looked like I took a friggin' dump!”

Alexis was downstairs now. She and Gabby smiled uncomfortably.

21

While they were setting up for me to interview Alexis in the living room, I was starting to get a queasy feeling about all this. Susan Haber had been sent along to sit in on the interview, and now she was telling me I couldn't ask Alexis anything about her case.

“But Jeffrey [Rubenstein] said I could,” I reminded her.

“Not now,” she said brusquely. “Another time.”

“When?”

“Not today,” Haber insisted. “If you ask her anything about it we're going to have to cut this short.”

I went outside on the lawn to call my editor.

“What do they think I'm doing here?” I complained. “They're acting like this is a celebrity profile. I think they just want publicity for the show.”

“Just do what you can,” he told me.

Alexis came into the room in full makeup, beaming. She was wearing a sweater and leggings, very Sandra Dee. We were seated on a mahogany couch with white and yellow pillows between us. Alexis sat cross-legged.

One of Andrea's sculptures of Buddha sat in the foreground. Susan Haber stood a few feet away, watching us sternly. A cameraman, a soundman, and Gennifer Gardiner were across the room. The camera started to roll.

“What's it like to be you?” I asked Alexis.

“My life's pretty cool,” Alexis said, very cutesy-bubbly. She seemed to be enjoying the
Vanity Fair
interview moment in her life. “I find myself to be a normal teenage girl. I go out a lot. I go to dinners with my friends and shopping. I shop everywhere.”

I asked her about her style.

“I'm just into a big new craze of tights and sweaters,” she said. “Big into shoes and handbags. I'm
always
in heels—at least five inches or taller. I have a pretty cool shoe collection going on right now. . . . I love fashion; eventually I'll have my own line. That's one of my goals. My shoes are everything from Christian Louboutin to Miu Miu to YSL . . . I have
tons
of bags.”

Susan Haber interrupted: “Can you make a statement that all of the shoes and handbags that you have—it's hard to purchase them. Like, ‘I can't afford this so that's why I like to go to cheap stores and once in a while I splurge.' ”

“Well, I
can't
always afford them,” Alexis amended. “I'm saving up plenty of paychecks, of course. I can't afford the high-end stuff all the time. I teach pole dancing, Pilates, hip-hop—that's my main income right now.” But since she had started filming the reality show, she'd stopped teaching classes. And how much does a pair of Louboutins cost? $500? $1,500? How much does a part-time pole dancing teacher make? I wondered.

“And of course modeling is great and I wish I could do that all the time,” Alexis said. “But with this business, sometimes you're on, sometimes you're off. And it's hard to save once you do get those big paychecks. . . . Saving is difficult. Also I save by not going to the tanning salon all the time or . . . I'll do my own nails.”

“What else is important to you?” I asked.

“My connection to the divine, my higher power,” Alexis said. “How I choose to connect with that is through my Buddhism and my meditation and chanting and stuff like that. . . . My life has gotten so
hectic
I don't have the time to do it every day, but through the day I'm constantly reminding myself and telling myself good affirmations. . . . I'm a firm believer in Karma and manifesting my own destiny through my thoughts and my actions. Whenever I feel like something's not going my way I just change my thoughts and start saying more positive affirmations and things end up going my way.”

“I've never really understood what Karma is and how it works,” I said. Like for instance, how was it working when you were charged with burglary? “Tell me.”

“Well,” Alexis said, “Karma, for me, it gets down to the science of it all; everything we say has a negative or positive charge on it and what you say is positive comes right back to you. . .So to me it's like, if you're doing something negative to yourself or someone else you're gonna get that back; and they say that if it's a negative thing it's ten times more likely to come back to you ten times stronger.

“My mom is an energy healer so we work on that all the time,” she went on. “Everything from tapping methods
¹³
to deep, deep meditation to some of her machines upstairs, which are incredible. She has these infrared machines, stuff to cure cancer.”

“Hypothetically,” I said, longing to turn the conversation to her legal battle, “if something bad were to happen to someone, how is that explained through Karma?”

Alexis said, “It comes down to choices. My Karmic journey was to bring truth to a situation. If that means for me to have to go through what I am going through—” She was starting to tear up. “My destiny is to bring truth to all of this, and I think that—” She was getting emotional again, like she had in Rubenstein's office when she started to talk about her destiny.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Alexis said, recovering her composure. “It all comes back to choices.”

“Do you see a lot of kids in L.A. making bad choices?” I asked.

She said, “I do. I'm not ever going to be one to say that I'm perfect or that I haven't made a bad choice in my life, but what I will say, with the choices that you make you're setting an example for the future kids. These days I'm looking at these celebrities getting into fights, being in abusive relationships, getting D.U.I.s and stuff like that, and I'm thinking to myself, what kind of example are you setting? The example that it sets for kids in my area is—they think drinking's cool 'cause of celebrities and all the Young Hollywood life and partying and stuff like that, and what we don't realize is our actions truly affect everyone.”